[% setvar title The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-08-27 %]
<div id="archive-notice">
    <h3>This file is part of the Perl 6 Archive</h3>
    <p>To see what is currently happening visit <a href="http://www.perl6.org/">http://www.perl6.org/</a></p>
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<div class='pod'>
<a name='The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-08-27'></a><h1>The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-08-27</h1>
<p>Where does the time go? I blame folk festivals. Once I'm getting busy
with the teacher training I'm going to have weekends free to write the
summaries. And if you'll believe that...</p>
<p>We start with perl6-internals.</p>
<a name='Incremental garbage collection'></a><h2>Incremental garbage collection</h2>
<p>Discussion of implementing incremental garbage collection continued.</p>
<a name='Calling conventions for unprototyped subroutines'></a><h2>Calling conventions for unprototyped subroutines</h2>
<p>Mattia Barbon asked for some clarification of how the calling
conventions work for unprototyped subroutines in IMCC. Specifically,
whether IMCC was behaving as documented in the Parrot Design Document
(PDD3). Leo reassured him that the TODO entry that had caused his
disquiet was obsolete and that IMCC does the right thing.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Mahogany-0.66.0-1060-20040821-182506.00@rbnet.it' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Compile op with return values'></a><h2>Compile op with return values</h2>
<p>Steve Fink asked how to go about returning something from dynamically
compiled code. He, Leo and Dan went over the issues. An unnamed (and as
yet unvolunteered) volunteer will probably write it all up and add it
to the parrot compiler FAQ.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040822060343.GI563@foxglove' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='NCI and callback functions'></a><h2>NCI and callback functions</h2>
<p>Stephane Peiry and Leo continued to work on getting NCI callbacks
working with the GTK library. They finally tracked the problem down,
but it looks awfully like Stephane's going to have to reimplement the
<code>gtk_main</code> loop to get everything working. Best of luck
Stephane. ParrotGTK would definitely be a cool thing.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040822164755.GA23921@pittypanda' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Planet Parrot'></a><h2>Planet Parrot</h2>
<p>Robert Spier announced the creation of Planet Parrot, an aggregator of
Parrot related blogs. If you have such a blog, Robert would probably be
interested in hearing from you.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=4129706F.6090304@pobox.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><a href='http://planet.parrotcode.org/' target='_blank'>planet.parrotcode.org</a></p>
<a name='GC/DOD API'></a><h2>GC/DOD API</h2>
<p>Leo and Dan continued to discuss and work on documenting Parrot's
memory management API.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a0611040cbd4f9cce3f0b@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<a name='NCI GC issues'></a><h2>NCI GC issues</h2>
<p>Dan noticed a problem with garbage collection and NCI PMCs. Leo tracked
the problem down and fixed it.</p>
<p>I love it when a plan comes together.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200408271316.i7RDGIE02447@thu8.leo.home' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Opinions on base behaviour'></a><h2>Opinions on base behaviour</h2>
<p>Base behaviour is disgusting and should be stamped out I tell you. We
have a moral duty to...</p>
<p>Ah...</p>
<p>Actually, the subject refers to Dan and Leo's desire to nail down the
behaviour of Parrot's basic types. He outlined the issues and asked for
discussion. And that's what he got.</p>
<p>It looks like Parrot's going to have a reasonably complete set of
numeric types which will allow accuracy nerds to avoid reals for as
long as possible. Which will be nice.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a06110403bd502ac7855b@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a0611040ebd51295d034c@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a06110416bd52357268b0@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a0611041abd52737df346@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a06110400bd53ecfa74a4@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[10.0.1.2]</p>
<a name='Concat, Cows &amp; Basil'></a><h2>Concat, Cows &amp; Basil</h2>
<p>Comfortably winning the &quot;weirdest subject line of the week&quot; award, Sam
Phillips laid out some of the problems he's having implementing a Basil
compiler which targets Parrot. Leo supplied answers.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=412B2D64.7000204@mac.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Low level math[s] op behaviour'></a><h2>Low level math[s] op behaviour</h2>
<p>As well as discussing basic types, Dan opened a discussion of the
proper semantics of Parrot's low level maths (yeah, he spelt it
'math', but I'm English and I'll spell it correctly) operators. In
particular he proposed variants that throw exceptions if strange things
happen.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a06110409bd5107fa798b@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<a name='Benchmark stuff'></a><h2>Benchmark stuff</h2>
<pre> Joshua Gatcomb posted some patches he'd made to F&lt;parrotbench.pl&gt; to
 make it a little less fragile and more useful. A few days later he
 announced a slightly more finished set of patches (Leo had checked his
 original patches in rather sooner than expected). </pre>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040824182920.63794.qmail@web60804.mail.yahoo.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040825225912.13884.qmail@web60809.mail.yahoo.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Resuscitating a mod_parrot'></a><h2>Resuscitating a mod_parrot</h2>
<p>Dan Sugalski looked upon mod_parrot and saw that it was cool, to the
point of being laid out on a mortuary slab. He thought that the time
had come to try and put some life back into the project, now that
Parrot's so much more capable. He asked for volunteers and Jeff Horwitz
seems to be (the only?) one of 'em.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=a0611041dbd52934064f5@' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>[172.24.10.164]</p>
<a name='PMC instantiation'></a><h2>PMC instantiation</h2>
<p>Leo posted another of his discussion documents, this time on
instantiating PMCs. No response so far.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=412D9577.4090409@toetsch.at' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Meanwhile, in perl6-language'></a><h1>Meanwhile, in perl6-language</h1>
<a name='Return with no expression.'></a><h2>Return with no expression.</h2>
<p>In the usual freewheeling perl6-language way, a thread entitled 'return
with no expression' ended up discussion how to disambiguate a <code>::</code>
which is part of <code>... ?? ... :: ...</code> expression and <code>::</code> in its role
as module sigil. (According to Luke it's easy; white space is
required).</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040820162108.GA18201@wall.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Synopses discussed'></a><h2>Synopses discussed</h2>
<p>Discussion of the draft synopses continued</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=BD4C401F.1E983' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a>%siracusa@mindspring.com - Synopsis 2</p>
<a name='POD tables?'></a><h2>POD tables?</h2>
<p>Aaron Sherman wondered if Perl 6's incarnation of POD would have
support for tables. Luke wasn't overly keen on Aaron's proposed syntax,
and Larry pointed out that they'd managed to use Perl 5's POD and some
clever processing to write tables for the third edition of Programming
Perl. Once again, it seems that everyone agrees that POD is great, but
could be greater, but nobody can agree on how to <i>make</i> it
greater. Me, I think Larry got it right enough.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=4126D251.9070105@ajs.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Constructors and mixins'></a><h2>Constructors and mixins</h2>
<p>Ovid had some questions about how Constructors work in Perl 6 and about
how to disambiguate methods when using Roles. Larry and Damian provided
answers.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040822150448.25180.qmail@web60804.mail.yahoo.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Instantiation'></a><h2>Instantiation</h2>
<p>Instantiation was on Aaron Sherman's mind too. He proposed some
syntactic sugar for creating objects at 'use' time. For some reason,
syntactic sugar proposals do seem to create lots of discussion.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1093279983.1171.104.camel@pps' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements'></a><h1>Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements</h1>
<p>I am reliably informed that a lot of last week's links were
broken. Which is odd because the code to generate them hasn't
changed. It looks like the problem's down to the gateway between
nntp.perl.org and groups.google.com being slightly radished at present.</p>
<p>However, I'm going to stick with the Google links in this summary in
the hopes that normal service will be returned shortly and things will
get backfilled. If anyone has a handy tool for getting from a message id
to an archive URL that works then I'd be happy to hear from them.</p>
<p>If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider
contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of
Perl. You might also like to send feedback or contributions to a
'getting Piers to OSCON 2005' fund to mailto:<a href='mailto:pdcawley@bofh.org.uk'>pdcawley@bofh.org.uk</a></p>
<p><a href='http://donate.perl-foundation.org/' target='_blank'>donate.perl-foundation.org</a> -- The Perl Foundation</p>
<p><a href='http://dev.perl.org/perl6/' target='_blank'>dev.perl.org</a> -- Perl 6 Development site</p>
<p>Amazingly, there's a small amount of newer content on my website this
week. Will wonders never cease?</p>
<p><a href='http://www.bofh.org.uk/' target='_blank'>www.bofh.org.uk</a></p>
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